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- A European Central Bank paper says DeFi governance in major protocols remains heavily concentrated among a small number of wallets.
- The study also finds that delegates dominate voting and that many key voters cannot be clearly identified, complicating regulatory oversight.
A new European Central Bank paper is adding weight to a question that has hovered over DeFi for years. How decentralized are these governance systems really?
The paper’s answer is not especially flattering for the sector’s biggest names. Looking at protocols including Aave, MakerDAO, and Uniswap, the ECB finds governance token ownership is highly concentrated, with the top 100 addresses controlling more than 80% of tokens in some cases. Many of those holdings, the study says, are linked not to dispersed communities but to the protocols themselves or centralized exchanges.
A small circle holds the votes
That matters because in DeFi, token ownership usually translates into governance power. On paper, DAOs are meant to spread decision-making across a broad base of users. In practice, the ECB paper suggests control often sits with a relatively narrow group of insiders, infrastructure players, and large holders.
The concentration is not just financial. Voting itself is increasingly shaped by delegates, individuals or entities that cast votes on behalf of token holders. According to the paper, these delegates dominate governance participation across several major protocols, effectively becoming the decision-making layer that many users never see directly.
The unidentified voter problem
One of the more awkward findings is how little can be verified about some of the actors with real influence. Roughly one-third of key voters could not be clearly identified, according to the paper, making it difficult to link governance activity to known institutions, developers, or token holders.
For regulators, that creates a familiar problem in a new wrapper. If governance power is concentrated but the people exercising it are partly opaque, then supervision becomes harder, not easier. And for DeFi itself, the findings reopen an old tension. The branding may still lean on decentralization, but the mechanics, at least in these cases, look a fair bit more centralized than advertised.
